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Livestaking – Sticking sticks in the ground and watching them grow

Fall is almost here and soon our plants will start going dormant. Once they do you might be planning on going around and chop-and-dropping some of them. While chop-and-drop is a great way to build soil you might be able to use the woody cuttings to get free plants!

This is called live staking and it’s the lazy persons way of growing new plants. My blog post—How to Use Live Stakes to Get Free Plants–is all about this great and easy method to get free plants for your wild homestead.

Essentially, live staking is simply taking hardwood cuttings (2+ feet long) and sticking them in the ground at least halfway down. You want to have several leaf buds below the ground and several above the ground.

Fall and winter is the best time to do this since you want the plants to be dormant and the soil moist.

But as great as this method is it won’t work with all plants. But since it is easy to do I’m always trying new plants out and sometimes I get lucky.

Check out the blog post for more details into live staking but keep reading for a list of plants that I have successfully live staked.

Plants that can be Live Staked

There are a number of plants that can be live staked but plants like willows and cottonwoods are the easiest to grow this way. But after trying out a number of other plants I now have a list of 10 plants that can be live staked.

A lot of these plants are native to my area. I will often take cuttings from native plants growing along roads or public trails and try live staking them. This can be a great way to get free native plants to grow on your wild homestead!

Now some of these same plants could be cultivated from hardwood cuttings in a nursery and likely with more success. But live staking requires no equipment beyond clippers which is why I like it so much.

One final tip is you can soak willow cuttings in a bucket of water along with other plants you want to live stake to give those plants a boost. Willows release a hormone that stimulates rooting in themselves and other plants.

This is why willows live stake so easily!

When you soak other plant cuttings with willows the released hormone helps to trigger those plants to root. I tend to leave them all in the bucket together for 3-5 days to give time for the hormones to be taken up by the plants.

Have You Tried Live Staking?

So have you tried live staking before? I would love to hear from you what plants worked and which did not. Please leave a comment with the plants you have successfully live staked!

If you have not tried this method before I would also love to hear your thoughts on it. Do you think you will give it a shot?

Live staking really is a great way to get more plants. I’m eyeing some branches on some of my red flowering currants that need to be cut back. Those branches are going in the ground!

Good to know that it works with Seaberry. I’ve been wanted to plant that and other thorny fruiting shrubs along the perimeter of my land, but with 10 acres I didn’t want to buy that many!

I'll test it with Siberian Pea Shrubs, Black Currants, Blackberries, Mulberries, and Wild Plums, and let you know how well they worked. In a few years I should have Juneberries, Hardy Oranges, and Haskaps to try it with, too.

I put some moringa in the ground 2 months ago and it had grown 18 inches when I headed back to Canada last week. But I think in the future, I will plant moringa from seed, because I'd like to get the taproot that doesn't always develop when done this way.

Ellendra Nauriel

Posts: 49

7

posted 3 days ago

1

Priscilla Stilwell wrote:I cut three moringa branches and stuck them in the ground a week or so ago, and they all have little leaves popping out already. I'm excited to try this with more trees.

Just a heads-up, that may or may not be a sign that it rooted. Cut branches will sometimes do that on their own, even when they're not planted. Give it some more time to make sure.

I am also trying to propagate Moringa with sticks in the ground. No big deal if they don't make it.

Idle dreamer

Dale Hodgins

pollinator

Posts: 8466

Location: Victoria British Columbia-Canada

691

posted 3 days ago

That's exactly what happened to one of my moringa. Even the one that survived initially grew some really nice foliage, which dropped off. But then it grew some more back, which has persisted. It was a new cutting from a healthy tree, so it had plenty of energy to do that without drawing any energy from roots that couldn't have possibly had time to develop. It put on 4in of leaf after being in the ground for only a week. The next bunch of leaves on the one that survived, came more slowly. It was done in full sun and most days we reached about 88° Fahrenheit. Not an ideal situation.

I have one willow stake that is thriving as a tree.
It's in a huge planter by my back porch.
The chooks love the leaves, it's like candy to them.

I started some willow stakes when it was still cold this year.
They did great, even thrived after being cracked at ground level(vandalism).
Finally died from something, the neighbor spraying them with poison is my bet.
I have built up my defenses since then, so I expect to try again.

I just tore the roof off my backyard shed.
I'm going to replace it with a pallet based living roof.
As part of the experiment, I'm going to bury fresh green willow branches lengthwise in the soil mix.
I hope it will spout along the length of each branch.
There will be a barrier between the soil and the plastic membrane, but it's still a risk.
If I'm successful, I might have trouble getting some of the chooks down at night!

I have two mulberry trees I have been pollarding.
I haven't been able to get the cuttings to root, but now I have a couple of barrels of rain water with sprayer heads going constantly.
The hope is to get hardwood cuttings to root.
If it works, I will be cranking out fruit and nut trees!
We shall see.